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We’re living in the best of times and the worst of times according to best-selling author and award-winning theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss. The best is represented by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has helped reveal the Higgs particle that ties together the standard model of physics. The worst is reflected by the president’s proposed federal budget that could derail physical science research. Krauss spoke about his latest book, The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far: Why Are We Here? (Atria Books, 2017) last week at Town Hall Seattle. It was an informative and humor-filled lecture.

“This is really humanity at its greatest,” said Krauss of the discoveries at the LHC, which represent the work of thousands of scientists from all over the world. Krause’s talk was a walk through the history of discovery in physics, going all the way back to Plato and along the way bumping into Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman, and more before arriving at quantum mechanics, the standard model, and the Higgs field.

“The real world is so different than the illusion that we see,” Krauss said. “The world of our experience is an illusion, and it’s an amazing story how we, over centuries, have been able to cut through that illusion to see reality underneath.”

We’ll leave the full tour of advances in physics to your reading of the book and, for this article, focus on Krauss’s take on the problems and challenges facing science today. He feels that much of the current mistrust of science stems from a common misconception that tomorrow’s science will make today’s obsolete, and that therefore scientific facts are little more than a subjective fad. Krauss said that is completely wrong.

Truth is eternal

“What is true today—and by true in science we mean what has satisfied the test of experiment today—will always be true,” he said. “Newton’s laws may have been supplanted at the extremes of scale by general relativity or quantum mechanics, but to describe baseballs or cannonballs or even rocket ships, they’re as true today as they were then, and whatever new physics we discover in quantum gravity or whatever, it’s not going to change. At the scale of humans, it’s got to revert to Newton’s laws. A million years from now, whatever we learn in science, if I let a ball go it’s going to fall as described by Newton’s laws.”

Krauss also let us in on what he jokingly referred to as a well-kept secret.

“Scientists are human,” he said. “That means they have prejudices and biases and pigheadedness, and that’s fine. What’s really neat is that science forces them in the right direction, kicking and screaming. The individual scientists are full of nonsense, but the scientific process protects us from that nonsense.”

Searching for a better toaster

Science is almost inextricably tied to technology, and Krauss frets that this causes people to wonder what new discoveries are “good for.”

“People don’t ask that for Mozart concertos or Picasso paintings or Shakespeare plays,” Krauss noted, “but it’s all the same thing. It’s what makes humanity worth living for. The fundamental importance of science, to me, is not the technology, but the fact that it forces us to confront reality and change our picture of our place in the cosmos. That’s what good literature, good music, good art do. That’s what the process of learning and growing as a society is all about.”

End of story?

The “So Far” in the title of the book is a reference to the notion that the story of discovery will continue to get more amazing if we keep asking questions. But Krauss is worried that we may not be able to do so. He noted that the president’s proposed federal budget would cut the Department of Energy—the primary funder of research in the physical sciences—by 20 percent, and eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute of Museums and Libraries. That would save around $1.82 billion, while Krauss notes that the same budget would provide $2 billion to start building a wall between the United States and Mexico.

“To protect us against these unimaginable horrors, we’re willing to cut these things in our society that are so central,” Krauss observed. “We are in the process of getting rid of what is important for making the nation worth defending.”

“Art, literature, music and science are part of the greatest story ever told, and when we give that up in the name of defense, what are we really killing?” he asked.

More books by Lawrence Krauss:

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Yuri’s afternoon

Wednesday is the 56th anniversary of the date cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly in orbit around the Earth. April 12 has since become known as “Yuri’s Night,” though many celebrations are sprinkled around the month. The Museum of Flight will observe Yuri’s Night on Saturday afternoon, April 15, at two o’clock. Professor Linda Dawson, author of the newly released The Politics and Perils of Space Exploration: Who Will Compete, Who Will Dominate? (Springer Praxis Books, 2017), will discuss her book about the “New Space” race and sign copies afterward.

Dawson, who served as Aerodynamics Officer for the Mission Control Center Ascent and Entry Flight Control Teams during the first space shuttle mission, is a senior lecturer in physical science and statistics at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and serves on a couple of Museum of flight committees.

Club events

The Boeing Employees Astronomical Society will meet at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 13 at the Boeing “Oxbow” recreation center. The program will feature NASA Solar System Ambassador Ron Hobbs, who will discuss the final months of the Cassini mission at Saturn. If you don’t mind a few spoilers, check out our recap of Hobbs’s talk on the subject given to the Seattle Astronomical Society in February. Non-Boeing employees are welcome, but must RSVP. Follow the link above for details.

The Tacoma Astronomical Society plans one of its public nights for 9 p.m. Saturday, April 15 at the Fort Steilacoom campus of Pierce College. The all-weather presentation will be about space rocks, asteroids, and comets. If the sky is clear, they’ll bring out the telescopes and see what’s up.

Planetaria

The Bellevue College planetarium will run a show about stars at 6 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 15. The shows are free, but reservations are strongly recommended as seating is limited. Visit the college website for reservation info and other details.

As a kid Nordgren was passionate about astronomy and already knew he wanted to be an astronaut. He was living in Portland, Oregon in 1979 when a total solar eclipse passed right over his house.

“Because of the news warning us about looking at the Sun, I was sure that if I accidentally looked at the Sun during the eclipse, there were these special rays that would come out and burn my eyes,” he recalled. “So I hid in the house with the curtains drawn and I watched it on TV.”

He could tell the eclipse was happening because the house got really dark, but that was his one and only take-away from the event.

“One of the things that has driven me to work on this and to help promote this eclipse that is coming up this year is I don’t want to see another nine-year-old child out there having the experience that I did!” Nordgren said.

Good things come to those who wait

“It took me twenty years to eventually, finally see (a total solar eclipse) for myself,” Nordgren noted. He described what it’s like, the things that happen approaching and during totality, but said that he had an unexpected reaction to that first totality.

“As an astronomer, I know the mechanics of the celestial alignment, yet in this moment of totality, I fully understand the difference between knowledge and feeling,” he said. “When I finally, after 20 years, got a chance to see this for myself as a professional astronomer south of Budapest in Hungary in 1999, I swear the hair stood up on the back of my neck. It still remains the most amazing thing I have ever seen in the sky.”

“I could understand why generations of human beings would cower in fear at this,” he added, “and wonder, ‘When is the life-giving Sun going to come back?’”

Eclipse science

Nordgren described some of the stories different cultures cooked up to explain eclipses, and also discussed some of the science done during eclipses, including the determination, from spectra, that the Sun was largely made of hydrogen and contained some iron. Helium was discovered on the Sun 25 years before it was found on Earth. Perhaps the most famous science made possible by an eclipse was the determination that mass can indeed bend light waves, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity and measured during a solar eclipse in 1919. The media coverage turned Einstein from an obscure physicist into an icon.

“This is what made Einstein Einstein in the popular culture,” Nordgren said.

Do not miss this!

This August’s total solar eclipse will be the first to cross the United States from coast to coast since 1918. Nordgren, also an artist, has designed travel posters for many of the spots along the path of totality, and shared them as he talked about the path the eclipse will take. You can see, and buy, them on his website.

He pointed out that virtually everyone in the country will be able to see some degree of partial solar eclipse, but he urged us all not to settle and stay home just because there might be traffic.

“Do not miss this!” Nordgren urged.

“The difference between being inside and outside that path of totality is literally the difference between night and day,” he noted. “Inside totality, the sky goes black, the Sun turns dark, the stars come out, the corona is visible. Outside totality, yeah, it kinda gets sorta dark. Yeah, use your glasses. Yeah, there’s a bite taken out of the Sun. But it will pale in comparison to what you experience—not just what you see, but what you feel inside that path of totality.”

Nordgren said a good solar eclipse may be just the thing that we need.

“In difficult times, when, heaven knows, there have been lots of things that do not unite us, here is going to be a moment in which we are all united under the shadow of the Moon, and we will all be seeing this together,” he said. “This will become the most photographed, the most Tweeted, the most Instagrammed, the most shared group moment in the history of the world.”

Tyler Nordgren’s new book Sun Moon Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets (Basic Books, 2016) is a must read for anyone with even the slightest interest in the heavens, or in the total solar eclipse that will sweep across the United States on August 21, 2017. It’s far more than a where-to-go and how-to-see-it tale, although those pointers do show up at the end (don’t stare at the partially eclipsed Sun without proper, certified shielding, folks.) The fun part is the history lesson suggested by the subtitle.

Indeed, total solar eclipses have been happening for millennia, and Nordgren travels the world to examine what ancient cultures made of this unusual phenomenon. The complete blotting out of the Sun was seldom considered a good thing by people who didn’t understand what was really going on. It has only been in very recent times that the total solar eclipse has been embraced as a tourist attraction. Nordgren’s explanations of how scientific thinking developed and helped explain what was happening during eclipses are engaging and fascinating, as are his tales of the science that has only been possible during these rare events.

Nordgren has become an eclipse chaser himself, and I enjoyed his accounts of his travels to view eclipses, especially his trip to the relatively remote Faroe Islands, between Scotland, Iceland, and Norway, for the eclipse of March 20, 2015. The islands are not exactly the world’s leading tourism destination, and yet they were on that day because it was one of the few dry-land locations from which to see that particular eclipse. It was an interesting tale of the lengths to which people will go to get into the path of totality of a solar eclipse, and how the communities within that path prepare and react to the event.

Most people seem to agree that next year’s total solar eclipse will be seen by more people than any other in history. Often times the path of totality mostly passes over water, as it did for the Faroe Islands in 2015. The last time a total solar eclipse crossed the U.S. like this was in June of 1918. The 2017 eclipse will cross a huge land mass with a large population, many opportunities for tourists, and easy access to the path of totality all along the way.

Sun Moon Earth is a delightful read and would be a most welcome gift for anyone on your list with an interest in astronomy. We included it in our recent gift guide for astronomy buffs.

Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University, is excited to be working in physics and astronomy at a time she and others call the “golden age of cosmology.”

“The maturity of our theoretical understanding, the sophistication of our instruments and tools that allow us to get the data—spacecraft, detectors—and the advanced computing are all aligned at the moment,” Natarajan said this week during a talk at Town Hall Seattle.

Natarajan has done a lot of work on mapping dark matter and dark energy, on gravitational lensing, and on figuring out how supermassive black holes are formed. It’s the latter that has her excited for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. She’s been a leader in pushing the idea that supermassive black holes could be formed by the direct collapse of matter. The physics pencils out, and Webb will peer back and possibly find the most distant, and therefore the first, black holes, and perhaps validate her ideas.

“The fact that you can come up with an idea as a scientist, for me, that’s the privilege,” she said.

“I believe very strongly that the current rampant disbelief in science stems from the contingent nature, the provisionality of science.” Natarajan said. “It’s something that’s very hard for the public at large to understand.”

The plus side is that cosmology and astronomy have the potential to win converts.

“Unlike many other fields in science, the night sky belongs to all of us,” she said. “We have to just look up and it’s there; the glory and the awe of the night sky.”

We know a lot

Natarajan finds it interesting that we know so much about the universe, with pretty solid evidence for much of what has happened since the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

“It still stuns me that with a cantaloupe-sized gelatinous thing in our skull we’ve been able to figure all of this out,” she laughed. Yet despite all we do know, she said there is still a lot of mystery about our peculiar universe.

“We happen to live in one in which the total energy content of the universe is dominated by two components that we don’t know what they are,” she said.

Chart: NASA

What we call them are dark matter, which makes up 24 percent of the universe, and dark energy, which makes up 71 percent. We and all the stuff we see are less than five percent. Though we don’t know what dark matter is, Natarajan said there is solid evidence that it is indeed out there.

“The idea came out of an empirical need to explain an observation,” she said. Oddly enough, one of her other research interests, black holes, were conceived in exactly the opposite fashion.

“Black holes were actually proposed as a mathematical entity,” she noted. “They were a mathematical solution to Einstein’s equations, and they eventually became real.”

A little history

Dark matter was first suggested by Fritz Zwicky in 1933. Vera Rubin and others looking at galaxies in the 1970s proposed it as the reason rapidly spinning galaxies don’t fly apart. Natarajan said more than 80 years of research has left little doubt.

“We have incontrovertible evidence from many independent lines of investigation for the existence of dark matter because of the effects it produces, although it has not been directly detected yet,” she said. “We don’t know the particle.”

There are two lines of evidence, according to Natarajan, that make dark matter far more than just an inference.

“We can exquisitely map it at the moment, even though we can’t see it, because of the gravitational influence that it exerts,” she said. “The other way in which we can detect dark matter is the impact that matter has on the propagation of light in our universe.”

This is where her work on gravitational lensing fits in. Large galaxy clusters, with as many as a thousand galaxies, can act as a sort of gravitational lens on steroids. Such clusters would be held together by enormous amounts of dark matter. The relativity “pothole” created by the cluster could be strong enough to split a beam of light.

“You end up seeing multiple images of an object where in reality there is only one object,” Natarajan said, noting that this has been observed many times now. Interestingly, she points out that the physics of both Newton and of Einstein would predict the effect.

“You can apply both of these arguments to clusters and you infer the same amount of dark matter,” she said. “In my opinion that is really, really strong evidence, compelling evidence, because they’re completely different world views and they still converge. There’s no escaping the concept of dark matter.”

Search for the holy grail

Natarajan said this sort of research may help us get to the holy grail of physics: a quantum theory of gravity.

“The motivation is to look for gaps, look for disagreements, and look for anomalies where an observation is actually inconsistent with our theoretical expectation,” she said.

A couple of great examples of this came out of the 1800s. The orbit of Uranus didn’t agree with Newton’s Laws, so they did the math and figured another planet could cause the observed discrepancies. That led to the discovery of Neptune. At the same time, there were anomalies in Mercury’s orbit, which led to the proposal that another planet, called Vulcan, was the cause. Vulcan was never found, but years later general relativity explained the precession of Mercury’s orbit perfectly.

“In one case the theory remained intact and an anomaly refined our understanding,” Natarajan said. “In the other case it pointed the way to the existence of a more fundamental covering theory that was yet to come.”

We can’t wait for the next breakthroughs in this golden age of cosmology.

You can purchase Mapping the Heavens by clicking the book cover or title link above. Buying through Seattle Astronomy helps defray our costs of creating and serving these articles. Thank you!

The Seattle Astronomy calendar is packed with interesting events this week, with something going on just about every evening. Seattle gets two talks about NEOWISE, the Mars program premieres on the National Geographic Channel, and there are several other lectures of note.

NEOWISE

Will an asteroid or comet one day smack into Earth again? One of the sets of eyeballs looking for Near Earth Objects (NEOs) is the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Joe Masiero, a JPL scientist with NEOWISE, will give two talks about the project this week in Seattle. He’ll speak at the monthly meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, November 16 in the Physics/Astronomy Auditorium on the University of Washington campus. Masiero will return to the same room at 4 p.m. Thursday, November 17 for a presentation at the weekly UW astronomy colloquium. He will give an overview of the NEOWISE mission, and present some results from the latest dataset release.

Mapping the heavens

The cosmos, once viewed as stagnant, even ordinary, is now understood to be a fathomless universe, expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy, and structured by dark matter. Theoretical astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, author of Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos (Yale University Press, 2016), will give a talk about these ideas at 7:30 p.m. Monday, November 14 at Town Hall Seattle. Natarajan will explain the science behind some of the most puzzling cosmological topics of our time and discuss why there is so much disagreement within the science community about astronomical discoveries.

If you are not able to attend this event and missed the previous ones in Portland and Eugene, fear not; Seattle Astronomy is working on a feature article about The Viking Mars Missions Education & Preservation Project. Stay tuned!

Eugene Astro

The Eugene Astronomical Society will hold its monthly meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday, November 17 at the Science Factory planetarium. The club’s mirror-grinding group will give a presentation about how reflecting telescopes’ primary mirrors are made, complete with demonstrations of the grinding process.

Cosmos on Tap

This month’s Astronomy on Tap Seattle event will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday, November 16 at Peddler Brewing Company in Ballard. They’ll view episode five of the original Carl Sagan Cosmos series, complete with Cosmos bingo, trivia contests, prizes, and beer. Astronomers will discuss what’s changed, and what science has held up, since the series first aired.

Astronomy on Tap Seattle is organized by graduate students in astronomy at the University of Washington.

A home in the stars

Want to live on Mars? Maybe a bad idea. Planetary scientist Amanda Hendrix and science writer Charles Wohlforth have looked into space colonization, and suggest that Saturn’s moon Titan might be a better place. The authors of Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets (Pantheon, 2016) will discuss their findings at 7:30 p.m. Friday, November 18 at Town Hall Seattle. Why Titan? It has a nitrogen atmosphere, a weather cycle, and an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy. Get the full story from Hendrix and Wohlforth; grab the book in advance.

Mars

OK, some may want to give Mars a shot! The television mini-series Mars premieres at 9 p.m. Monday, November 14 on the National Geographic Channel (although an online stream of the opening episode has been available online for several weeks now.) Part feature film, part documentary, the series takes a look at what a Mars mission might look like in 2033, and talks with today’s experts about the development of technology and capabilities that could make such a mission a reality. Ron Howard is an executive producer of the series, which has been directed by Everardo Gout.

TAS

The Tacoma Astronomical Society plans one of its free public nights for 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 19 at the Fort Steilacoom campus of Pierce College. The all-weather presentation will be about the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. If the skies are clear club astronomers will break out the telescopes for some observing.

The evening will include a meet-and-greet reception from 5:30 until 6:30, Guthrie’s presentation at 6:30, the panel discussion at 6:45, and a question-and-answer session and book signing from 7:30 until 8:30. Cost is $10 and tickets are available online.

You can pick up a copy of the book at the link above or by clicking the image of the book cover.

Astro club events

The Rose City Astronomers will hold their monthly meeting at 7:30 p.m. Monday, October 17 at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. The guest speaker will be astronaut Michael Barratt, who spent 199 days in space as flight engineer for International Space Station expeditions 19 and 20 in 2009 and also flew on STS-133, the final flight of the shuttle Discovery, in 2011. Barratt is a native of the Portland area.

The Eastside Astronomical Society will hold its monthly meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday, October 18 in the Willard Geer Planetarium at Bellevue College. Patti Terhune-Inverso, an astronomy instructor at the college and a member of Eastside Astronomical Society, will present the introduction to the constellations that she uses for her classes at the beginning of each quarter.

The Seattle Astronomical Society will hold its monthly meeting at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 19 in room A102 of the Physics/Astronomy building on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The program had not been published as of this writing.

Astronomy in Pierce County Saturday

Pierce College will host a couple of events at its Fort Steilacoom campus on Saturday, October 22.

Spook-tober continues at the Pierce College Science Dome, which will be presenting a kids’ show called “Haunted Night Sky” on Saturdays through Halloween. Participants will be able to find creatures in the night sky, build a Frankenstein satellite, and take a tour of the Sea of Serpents on the Moon, the Witch’s Head Nebula, and other spooky places in the universe. Best for kids ages 3-12. Shows are scheduled for 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. each Saturday. Cost is $3.

The Tacoma Astronomical Society plans one of its public nights for Saturday evening at 7:30. The indoor program will be a Halloween special. They’ll break out the telescopes for observing if the weather cooperates.

Up in the sky

The Orionid meteor shower peaks this Friday and Saturday. Learn about the showers and other observing highlights for the week by visiting This Week’s Sky at a Glance by Sky & Telescope magazine and The Sky This Week by Astronomy.